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STORY: SIERRA LEONE / EBOLA AMBULANCES
TRT: 2.00
SOURCE: UNMEER
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 15 DECEMBER 2014, FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE
1. Wide shot, health workers washing ambulances while wearing PPEs
2. Wide shot, worker wearing PPE spraying another worker’s hands
3. Various shots, health workers in PPEs being sprayed
4. Med shot, ambulance departs
5. Various shots, ambulance driving through the city:
6. Traveling shot, people walking the streets
7. Various shots, ambulance driving through rural areas
8. Pan left, from makeshift house to medical workers outside ambulance
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Alpha Jo Jalloh, Emergency Ebola Responder:
“Well, we come and we ask for the patient, the people say they don’t see the patient no more. So we are going to turn back.”
10. Pan right, ambulance making a turn
11. Wide shot, youths leading ambulance towards patient
12. Wide shot, ambulance driving through rough terrain
13. Wide shot, youth leading medical workers through the brush towards patient
14. Wide shot, medical worker and youths waiting outside patient’s house
15. Wide shot, patient climbing into ambulance with difficulty
16. Pan right, from medical worker putting on PPE to patient coughing inside ambulance
17. Various shots, patient’s house being sprayed
18. Pan right, local residents
19. Wide shot, patient’s house being sprayed
20. Wide shot, ambulance departing towards holding centre
As registered cases reach alarming numbers in Sierra Leone, the national Ebola response is intensifying efforts to reach all suspected patients and to bring them to holding centres and Ebola Treatment Units (ETUs).
A fire department depot in Freetown is now operating as an ambulance emergency operating centre. From this site, 16 ambulances accompanied by teams of sprayers on motorcycles are dispatched to locations all over the Western Area.
The increasingly high transmission rates in Sierra Leone were reported in recent weeks, leading the Government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) to mount a surge response, to be launched on Wednesday. More ambulances are on the way.
As this ambulance team reaches its destination, the patient is nowhere to be found, and no one knows where he has gone to. Lack of infrastructure and communications is one of the many challenges faced by responders.
SOUNDBITE (English) Alpha Jo Jalloh, Emergency Ebola Responder:
“Well, we come and we ask for the patient, the people say they don’t see the patient no more. So we are going to turn back.”
The operations centre dispatches the ambulance to another location which also proves hard to find. Finally the suspected patient is reached and is taken by ambulance to a holding centre where he will be tested for the Ebola virus.
His home is sprayed with chlorine to eliminate all traces of the virus.
With some 8,069 cases, Sierra Leone is now the worst-affected country in West Africa, according to UNMEER's latest data. Together, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have so far registered over 18,000 cases of Ebola, including more than 6,300 deaths.
